The Familiar

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-12

Chapters 13-20

Chapters 21-31

Chapters 32-40

Chapters 41-55

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

The Refranes

The refranes are an important plot device but they also symbolize the beauty, magic, and antiquity of Luzia’s Jewish heritage, preserving the language of the Jews who were expelled by edict and who have been forced to hide their spiritual and cultural practices from the Inquisition. When Luzia first heard her aunt read the refranes, “she’d felt the language twist and take on a new shape, heard the melody those words made” (249). She made an iris bloom, the first hint of what she could do with these words—“words that had begun as Spanish and been transformed beneath a foreign sun, words made solid by ink and carried over the sea into her aunt’s waiting hands” (286). The refranes are small sayings but their significance becomes enormous, hinting at the power of the mundane, the small, and the overlooked. They are a symbol of creative power, the source of which is sacred, mysterious, and often inexplicable.

The Pomegranate

The pomegranate that Santángel gifts to Luzia symbolizes, first, the manifestation of her power. Her ability to sprout the pomegranate seed reveals Luzia’s power to manipulate living things, a step above fixing burned bread and broken glasses. When Víctor pressures her and Luzia’s spell gets out of control, the pomegranate explodes into a tree, revealing a new dimension and maturity to her power, which also can destroy.

Santángel brings her a pomegranate from her tree when they later discuss what happened. He offers several meanings for the pomegranate as a fruit, but when Luzia chooses to eat the fruit she made, she acknowledges her power and the consequences. Her eating the pomegranate is likewise an expression of her desire and her ambition. Once she eats it—once she has owned her power—Luzia feels she has changed, becoming unrepentant about her desires. This includes wanting Santángel as well as wanting to win the torneo.

The Scorpion

The scorpion is introduced as a deadly creature that can kill with its sting, a symbol of the dangers of the world, both natural and man-made. The scorpion Luzia finds in her hairbrush when she is at La Casilla represents the danger that surrounds her, not only from other competitors but also from the scrutiny that will accompany becoming visible to the officials of the king.

Santángel is also known as “the Scorpion,” a nickname acquired by the use his masters make of him as an assassin; the earthen pit below the house where his masters imprison him when they are displeased is referred to as “the scorpion’s den,” indicating the ways his masters try to subjugate and use him as a weapon. The scorpion is described as a secretive animal, which adds to the sense of fear surrounding it—secrets have power, as the refranes demonstrate. Like Santángel, the scorpion is deadly but only kills when compelled to.

Oranges

Oranges and orange groves appear as an important motif in the novel, associated many times with the sacred: Spiritual or holy experiences often leave the one experiencing them with the scent of oranges or orange blossoms. Oranges are also associated with the sweetness of desire, as when Valentina dreams she is walking with Quiteria Escárcega long before she acknowledges that she is attracted to her (228). Luzia has the same experience, as before she admits her desire for Santángel, she dreams she is walking through an orange grove holding the hand of a man she doesn’t see.

When Luzia and Santángel first make love, others around La Casilla are affected by their desire, manifested in the scent of orange blossoms. Orange is a heady scent associated with growing things, blossoming and maturing fruit, something taking the shape it is meant to have. In the last paragraphs of the novel, the image of Luzia and Santángel walking hand-in-hand through an orange grove, a moment they have both dreamed of, lends a sense of destiny and culmination to their lives together.